Is It Time for a Transhumanist Olympics? Huffington Post Oracle Team USA made a historic comeback to beat Emirates Team New Zealand in the American's Cup in San Francisco last month.

luiy's insight:

In the last 50 years, science and technology have brought our society into a new age. Whether it's the internet, space travel, or the harnessing of nuclear energy, the world is a very different place than when the first modern-day Olympics took place in 1896 in Greece.

Rather than change traditional sporting events, which holds a special place in many of our hearts, why not add a whole new category to them? For a moment, imagine a transhumanist Olympic Games: a place for athletes in the 21st Century who have modified themselves with drugs, technologies, and bionic enhancements. A place where the best human potential combines with the most advanced science to create the coolest competitions possible. Who wouldn't be thrilled to be at an Olympics where humans can pole vault over 25 meters? Or peddle a bicycle 100 miles per hour? Or powerlift a ton.

"Multiple medical and surgical technologies already exist to improve physical performance," says Dr. Joseph N. Carey, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon at University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine. "These technologies can be used to maximize, or even supercharge human abilities. The question is: Will society ever begin to think implementing such actions is a good thing?"

A Colorado man made history at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) this summer when he became the first bilateral shoulder-level amputee to wear and simultaneously control two of the Laboratory’s Modular Prosthetic Limbs. Most importantly, Les Baugh, who lost both arms in an electrical accident 40 years ago, was able to operate the system by simply thinking about moving his limbs, performing a variety of tasks during a short training period.

Baugh was in town for two weeks in June as part of an APL-funded research effort to further assess the usability of the MPL, developed over the past decade as part of theRevolutionizing Prosthetics Program. Before putting the limb system through the paces, Baugh had to undergo a surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital known as targeted muscle reinnervation.

“It’s a relatively new surgical procedure that reassigns nerves that once controlled the arm and the hand,” explained Johns Hopkins Trauma Surgeon Albert Chi, M.D. “By reassigning existing nerves, we can make it possible for people who have had upper-arm amputations to control their prosthetic devices by merely thinking about the action they want to perform.”

After recovery, Baugh visited the Laboratory for training on the use of the MPLs. First, he worked with researchers on the pattern recognition system.

“We use pattern recognition algorithms to identify individual muscles that are contracting, how well they communicate with each other, and their amplitude and frequency,” Chi explained. “We take that information and translate that into actual movements within a prosthetic.”

This essay is a re-writing of “The Funeral Ceremonies of the Parsees,” by Jivanji Jamshedji Modi, originally read before the Anthropological Society of Bombay, on September 30, 1891, a fair-use of that content for creative literary aims. To those of the Zoroastrian faith I apologize for my shameless re-purposing of your time-honored traditions. My rationale for doing so is not to diminish or mock these ceremonies and beliefs, but to help contemporary people who are unfamiliar with these practices to look to the interesting and diverse history of human religion for ideas on how we can better understand and use new technology in a harmonious way.

MindRDR, as the app is called, links up Google Glass with another piece of head-mounted hardware, the Neurosky EEG biosensor, to create a communication loop.

The Neurosky biosensor picks up on brainwaves that correlate to your ability to focus. The app then translates these brainwaves into a meter reading that gets superimposed on the camera view in Google Glass. As you “focus” more with your mind, the meter goes up, and the app takes a photograph of what you are seeing in front of you.

As shown during the three last blog’s article (part 1 on Health, part 2 on Artificial Intelligence, part 3 on Robotics), Google is emancipating from its original core business.

luiy's insight:

Before 2013, all purchases of Google were intended to develop and optimize services directly related to Internet (its core business), either in the domain of pictures, or data processing, web analytics, map software, ads, blogging…

Google’s business is in mutation: this company is not focused on the IT domain only but also in the promising field of NBIC. The Nanotechnologies (N), Biology (B), Information technologies (I) and Cognitive sciences (artificial intelligence and brain-related sciences) (C) are improving and converging, in a sense that discoveries in a domain are serving the others domains, and this synergy allow fantastic advances.

Krichmar and his team are experimenting with robotic awareness and trying to teach mechanical brains to behave more like human and animal brains by programming traits that mimic obsessive-compulsive disorder or a fear of open spaces.

For instance, the team studied the actions of neurotransmitter chemicals serotonin and dopamine in mice as the animals solved a maze or reacted to an unfamiliar environment. Neurotransmitters are the chemicals that combine to constitute awareness and to contribute to our senses of pleasure and well-being.

Titled Archaeology, Anthropology and Interstellar Communication and edited by SETI Director of Interstellar Message Composition Douglas Vakoch, the document draws on "issues at the core of contemporary archaeology and anthropology" to prepare us "for contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, should that day ever come."Addressing a field that has been dominated by astronomers, physicists, engineers, and computer scientists, the contributors to this collection raise questions that may have been overlooked by physical scientists about the ease of establishing meaningful communication with an extraterrestrial intelligence. These scholars are grappling with some of the enormous challenges that will face humanity if an information-rich signal emanating from another world is detected. Among the book's 16 chapters: Speaking for Earth: Projecting Cultural Values Across Deep Space and Time; Learning To Read:Interstellar Message Decipherment from Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives; and Mirrors of Our Assumptions: Lessons from an Arthritic Neanderthal. Sounds look good afternoon reading to us. Download the PDF here. For EPUB and MOBI formats, click here.

Oculus has found a way to make a headset that does more than just hang a big screen in front of your face. By combining stereoscopic 3-D, 360-degree visuals, and a wide field of view—along with a supersize dose of engineering and software magic—it hacks your visual cortex. As far as your brain is concerned, there’s no difference between experiencing something on the Rift and experiencing it in the real world.

luiy's insight:

ANATOMY OF THE RIFT

The Brain.

The biggest challenge in creating realistic VR is getting the image to change with your head movements, precisely and without any perceptible lag. The Rift fuses readings from a gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer to evaluate head motion. Even better, it takes 1,000 readings a second, allowing it to predict motion and pre-­render images, shaving away precious milliseconds of latency.

The Display.

Even the best LCD can take 15 milliseconds for all its pixels to change color. The Rift uses AMOLED screens, which can switch color in less than a millisecond. Oculus also figured out how to deactivate those pixels rapidly so the image doesn’t smear or shake when you whip your head around.

The Optics.

You want an image that fills your entire field of vision without distortion. Typically that requires heavy, expensive lenses. The Rift uses a pair of cheap magnifying lenses, and Oculus developers distort their games so they look right when viewed through the optics.

Positional Tracking.

Previous VR headsets let you look around but not move around. The Rift’s small exter­nal camera monitors 40 infrared LEDs on the headset, tracking motion and letting you crouch, lean, or approach an in-game object.

"Beyond that, though, the company and its technology herald nothing less than the dawn of an entirely new era of communication. Mark Zuckerberg gestured at the possibilities himself in a Facebook post in March when he announced the acquisition: “Imagine enjoying a courtside seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world, or consulting with a doctor face-to-face—just by putting on goggles in your home.” That’s the true promise of VR: going beyond the idea of immersion and achieving true presence—the feeling of actually existing in a virtual space."

Sensors are cheap and abundant. They’re already in our devices, and soon enough, many of us may elect to carry sensors in and on our bodies, and embed them in our homes, offices, and cities. This terrifies people, Jason Silva says in a new video.

Who hasn’t heard of Big Brother or feared the rise of the surveillance state? But Silva says there’s an upside.

As the world is reduced to “algorithmic cascades of data” he thinks we’ll get what Steven Johnson calls the “long view,” like a microscope or telescope for previously invisible information and datasets.

Billions of sensors measuring location, motion, orientation, pressure, temperature, vital signs and more—each of these will be like a pixel. Seen up close, a modestly flashing primary color. But at a distance, individual pixels dissolve. Discrete points will smooth out into a contiguous image no one could have guessed by looking at each pixel alone.

Hooking the brain up to a computer can do more than let the severely disabled move artificial limbs. It is also revealing the secrets of how we learn

When the patient Scheuermann began losing control of her muscles in 1996, due to her genetic disorder—spinocerebellar degeneration— she gave up her successful business as a planner of murder-mystery-themed events. By 2002 her disease had confined her to a wheelchair, which she now operates by flexing her chin up and down. She retains control of the muscles only in her head and neck. “The signals are not getting from my brain to my nerves,” she explains. “My brain is saying, ‘Lift up!’ to my arm, and my arm is saying, ‘I caaaan't heeeear you.’”

Yet technology now exists to extract those brain commands and shuttle them directly to a robotic arm, bypassing the spinal cord and limbs. Inside Scheuermann's brain are two grids of electrodes roughly the size of a pinhead that were surgically implanted in her motor cortex, a band of tissue on the surface of the brain that controls movement. The electrodes detect the rate at which about 150 of her neurons fire. Thick cables plugged into her scalp relay their electrical activity to a lab computer. As Scheuerman thinks about moving the arm, she produces patterns of electrical oscillations that software on the computer can interpret and translate into digital commands to position the robotic limb. Maneuvering the arm and hand, she can clasp a bar of chocolate or a piece of string cheese before bringing the food to her mouth.

When neuroscientists first set out to develop brain-controlled prostheses, they assumed they would simply record neural activity passively, as if taping a speech at a conference. The transcript produced by the monitored neurons would then be translated readily into digital commands to manipulate a prosthetic arm or leg. “Early on there was this thought that you could really decode the mind,” says neuroscientist Karunesh Ganguly of the University of California, San Francisco.

Yet the brain is not static. This extraordinarily complex organ evolved to let its owner react swiftly to changing conditions related to food, mates and predators. The electrical activity whirring inside an animal's head morphs constantly to integrate new information as the external milieu shifts.

Ganguly's postdoctoral adviser, neuroscientist Jose M. Carmena of the University of California, Berkeley, wondered whether the brain might adapt to a prosthetic device as well. That an implant could induce immediate changes in brain activity—what scientists call neuroplasticity—was apparent even in 1969, when Eberhard Fetz, a young neuroscientist at the University of Washington, reported on an electrode placed in a monkey's brain to record a single neuron. Fetz decided to reward the animal with a banana-flavored pellet every time that neuron revved up. To his surprise, the creature quickly learned how to earn itself more bites of fake banana. This revelation—that a monkey could be trained to control the firing rate of an arbitrary neuron in its brain—is what Stanford University neuroscientist Krishna Shenoy calls the “Nobel Prize moment” in the field of brain-computer interfaces.

Scientists were beginning to discover, however, that neurons can adjust their tuning in response to the software. In a 2009 study Carmena and Ganguly detailed two key ways that neurons begin to learn. Two monkeys spent several days practicing with a robotic arm. As their dexterity improved, their neurons changed their preferred direction (to point down rather than to the right, for example) and broadened the range of firing rates they were capable of emitting. These tuning adjustments gave the neurons the ability to issue more precise commands when they dispatched their missives.

1) That cybernetic patterns of information provide the ultimate and best way to understand reality.

2) That people are no more than cybernetic patterns.

3) That subjective experience either doesn’t exist, or is unimportant because it is some sort of ambient or peripheral effect.

4) That what Darwin described in biology, or something like it, is in fact also the singular, superior description of all creativity and culture.

5) That qualitative as well as quantitative aspects of information systems will be accelerated by Moore’s Law.

And finally, the most dramatic:

6) That biology and physics will merge with computer science (becoming biotechnology and nanotechnology), resulting in life and the physical universe becoming mercurial; achieving the supposed nature of computer software. Furthermore, all of this will happen very soon! Since computers are improving so quickly, they will overwhelm all the other cybernetic processes, like people, and will fundamentally change the nature of what’s going on in the familiar neighborhood of Earth at some moment when a new “criticality”is achieved- maybe in about the year 2020. To be a human after that moment will be either impossible or something very different than we now can know.

In a paper published on Thursday in the journal Science, physicists at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at the Delft University of Technology reported that they were able to reliably teleport information between two quantum bits separated by three meters, or about 10 feet.

Quantum teleportation is not the “Star Trek”-style movement of people or things; rather, it involves transferring so-called quantum information — in this case what is known as the spin state of an electron — from one place to another without moving the physical matter to which the information is attached.

Classical bits, the basic units of information in computing, can have only one of two values — either 0 or 1. But quantum bits, or qubits, can simultaneously describe many values. They hold out both the possibility of a new generation of faster computing systems and the ability to create completely secure communication networks.

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